The Final 'Hunger Games' Should Be Rated R 

Here are the four scenes in the book that would make it happen.

movie will be here in November, and while the trailer promises a film that goes far beyond its predecessors, there\'s no way it\'ll go as far as the book. That\'s because it\'ll be rated PG-13, and to deliver the book\'s full impact, it would definitely need to be Rated R.

And it should be Rated R. To make these movies easier to watch by taming down the violence for a PG-13 rating is to undermine the impact of the

series. Much like anti-war novels such as 

books rely, in part, on stomach-churning descriptions of visceral violence to drive home their message.

movies have been hamstrung from the start by their PG-13 ratings. The most egregious was the first movie, which cut away from every single death blow with a calculation that director Gary Ross couldn\'t mask with shaky cam shots. With that in mind here\'s a rundown of the most R-rated moments from the second half of 

. — moments that won\'t be nearly as meaningful in a PG-13 movie.

When Katniss and her team of operatives make it into the Capitol, they find themselves facing a gauntlet of booby traps that turn the city into one last Arena. At first, Katniss and her team are kept busy clearing some of those traps, but it doesn\'t take long for them to fall victim to a few they didn\'t know about. It all happens very quickly, creating a sense of chaos as the team goes from kind-of-bored to nearly obliterated. The first gruesome thing that happens is that Boggs steps on a bomb and loses his legs. The team comes to his aid as the commander begins to bleed out, but it\'s not long before they\'re forced to retreat when an oily black liquid starts to pour into the street like a wave. Katniss tries to help haul Boggs away, but before she can, she\'s tackled by Peeta. One of her teammates, Mitchell, wrestles with Peeta, who throws Mitchell against a wall, where a net made of razor wire pins him to a wall like something out of 

. The rest of the team barely escapes (and they even drag a dying Boggs along with them), but after witnessing all that carnage, they\'re left shaken.

The most horrific thing Suzanne Collins dropped into the 

 trilogy was a pack of nightmarish lizard muttations that race through the Capitol\'s underground waterways in search of fresh blood while loudly hissing the name "Katniss" into the darkness. The humanoid reptiles tear apart several members of Katniss\' team, including (most tragically) Finnick O\'Dair. It\'s not the first time in the book series President Snow used genetically manufactured monsters to terrorize and terminate characters, but it\'s certainly the most gruesome. The trailers have already revealed the lizard mutts are in the movie, but to make them as gory as their book counterparts would certainly require an R rating.

Near the end of the book, the Capitol\'s children are corralled into a fenced-off area to keep them safe outside President Snow\'s mansion. Katniss quickly sees this as the heartless scheme it is — the children are Snow\'s human shields. Soon after she sees this, a series of bombs are dropped on the kids, leaving their holding pen a blood-strewn mess. We doubt the full impact of the scene could possibly be delivered in a PG-13 movie. But it gets even worse.

After the bombing, a team of District 13 medics (including Katniss\' younger sister, Prim) rushes in to help the kids. But shortly after the medics arrive, silver parachutes begin to fall from the sky, and since everyone has seen the annual Hunger Games on television, they know silver parachutes mean help. Naturally, all the children start to grab the parachutes, which turn out to be carrying bombs. They all detonate, killing many of the children and medics, including Prim, and leaving Katniss with near-lethal burns over much of her body. We\'re sure the scene will still make it into the PG-13 movie, but we\'re also sure it\'ll lose much of its impact as it\'s made easier to watch through creative editing.

I'm the Senior Editor for movies on Zimbio.com, which means I spend way too much time thinking about the geekiest possible ways to approach the cineplex. I'm also hopelessly addicted to audio books. Follow me: Twitter | Google

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